Dear visiting students,
Congratulations on your admission to Bowdoin College. The task of the admissions office here is not an easy one—many of the students who apply can handle the course load at the college and would be great contributors to the community, but admissions saw something special in you, and we want you to come here.
So, the tables have turned. You were once an anxious student visiting colleges wondering if you were good enough for them. Now, you need to judge whether Bowdoin is your top choice—we are now your suitors as you visit our home over the next three weeks. If this place "feels right" you have four years to decide why it is you came here! Personally, I am still trying to figure out why I left the Midwest and traveled a thousand miles to attend college in this tiny school in Maine.
One of the big differences between high school and college is that in college, the content of your thought begins to matter. In high school, teachers are more interested in making sure you can read long books, write grammatically sound essays, and use the academic resources at your disposal. In college, you need to begin developing some beliefs on your own. You need to take a stance on some of the perennial human questions and slowly develop a position on the most divisive political issues of our time.
One of the things you should consider when choosing a college is the character of the intellectual life. The professors here are great and many students carry a real intellectual fire. Bowdoin is far from a monolithic place, but I will confess to you that when it comes to the intellectual diversity here, we are seriously lacking—very few students here deviate from the accepted range of liberal opinion. With fewer than 10 passionate conservative voices on campus at a school of around 1600, I've found that the vigorous debate I dreamt of when coming here is hard come by. The faculty is overwhelmingly repulsed by conservatism. This is most harmful for liberals who hardly ever find it necessary to bring forth a serious intellectual argument to support their cause. The historic rivalry between liberals and conservatives does not flourish here. As disappointing as this discovery was, I think you should come here anyway.
Although you will not be debating the future of the world order here with people who virulently disagree with you, I've found that I can still learn a lot. The reason I am glad I came to Bowdoin is that I am learning why there are no conservatives here. It seems to me that one of the most important questions today is, "Why are there so few conservative students and faculty in our nation's eminent liberal arts schools?" Hundreds of years of history, scientific innovation, philosophy, and literature are lurking beneath superficial explanations for this lopsidedness and can shed light on why so many students and professors here bind together in liberalism. The intellectual conformity here ironically has its roots in an admirable desire to make all students strong enough to resist conforming.
The reason you should come here anyway is that when you look at the cases of real Bowdoin students, you do not see a passive assent to liberal dogma, but a profound struggle to reconcile the demands of our inherited Judeo-Christian morality with the emancipative spirit of the post-60s liberal university. Although few students here consider themselves conservative, the term "liberal," when you look at how many people actually fit under this umbrella, is pretty much meaningless. This struggle is not something merely abstract—we are talking about real people here.
At Bowdoin, you will find committed Christian black students who have an uneasy relation with a "postmoral" culture but see so much inequality in their own communities that they cannot even consider respecting the GOP.
You will find gays and lesbians trying to figure out how to reconcile their pagan sexualities with their desire to participate in the western traditions of marriage and family.
You will find chemistry, biology, and neuroscience majors tormented by the realization that their quest for scientific knowledge reveals truths that are at odds with their inherited moral convictions.
You will find literary postmodernists who feel a fervent desire to preserve a canonical liberal education.
You will find 150 Jews, atheists, and Christians crowded in Moulton's Main Lounge to celebrate the Jews' exodus from Egypt. They sit there with a glass of Manischewitz wine in one hand while they ponder, "How can this great tradition continue to survive?"
No, you will not find any intellectual conservatives who are the rightful heirs of Burke, Tocqueville, Chesterton, or Buckley. But, you also will not find many students here who are seriously comfortable with the current commercial, technological, and social erosion of our noblest inherited traditions.
If you come here, we cannot promise you will find the typical battle of political ideologies. We can promise you, however, that you will contend with the oldest paradox—the struggle between tradition and emancipation.